There are various fields, such as video surveillance, where multiple streams of data, from various sources, may be collected and analyzed. For example, signals from one or more video cameras and/or other monitoring sensors may be collected and simultaneously sent to a control station to be displayed on one or more display monitors. In addition to being displayed, the visual streams may also be recorded and stored.
In a control station, for example the monitors displaying the visual information from the video cameras, may be viewed and analyzed by a human operator. The human operator may be, for example, a security officer, who will be scrutinizing the displays for suspicious activity. This analysis may be performed on the live feeds coming in from the cameras, or it may be performed on earlier, stored signals.
In the past, the analysis process of this visual information may become quite daunting, especially when surveillance is performed with many cameras and/or on a large area. Since a human operator has all limitations native to humans, he or she may miss certain events that are displayed on the monitors. It is therefore advantageous, to provide a system that can assist human operators analyzing large amounts of visual data that solves the deficiency of the prior art systems.
In order to overcome the above deficiencies in the prior art, a system is needed to provide rich camera management that enables sophisticated recording and archiving of video and automated video alerts based on intelligent analysis and detection. A system is needed which allows users monitoring multiple video and other monitoring sources to easily access and interpret such information and data in a manner that allows greater flexibility and enhanced functionality.